Building a toolbox for prosocial health messaging – Scholar Q&A with Sisi Hu

July 25, 2023 • Jonathan McVerry

Scholars Sisi Hu and Amanda Hinnant share a common interest in researching prosocial health and science communication. Their collaboration started at the University of Missouri where Hu was a Ph.D. student and Hinnant was her dissertation adviser. Hu recently became an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, but their collaboration continues. Their project studying motivations of messaging in the nonprofit health sector is part of the Page Center’s 2023 research call on prosocial communication. The first-time Page Center scholars hope to identify effective messaging practices that will encourage people to perform prosocial behaviors, such as clinical trial participation or organ donation.

How does prosocial messaging relate to health communication? What are some of the challenges communicators face when working in this space?

When we say prosocial health behavior, it's different from regular health behavior. Prosocial health behavior involves people taking action for the benefit of others, not for the benefit of themselves. It is difficult to make people perform prosocial health behavior. Why? Because for regular health behavior, like nutritious eating, we can focus on the personal benefits. We can say “Eating healthy or exercising is good for you.” Prosocial health behavior is so challenging because there are few personal benefits we can point to. There are little to no direct benefits to the person themself.

Can you provide an example that would showcase the difficulty of prosocial communication?

When we look at clinical trial participation research, we see that most people think participating in clinical trials is good. People have a very positive attitude toward it. They think, “Oh, definitely, more people should do that.” But when you ask them to sign up, they don’t sign up. And there is a big gap. Traditional health communication research says that attitude and intention can predict behavior, but that model is so hard to apply to a prosocial case. That is because the attitude does not predict the behavior. People may always support the idea of a behavior, but they just don't do it. That gap between attitude and behavior is what led us to this topic.

Was it just this kind of thinking that led you to this project idea or were there other parts to it?

I have a personal experience that connects me to this project. When I lived in China, I was a volunteer at a blood center in Shanghai. I mainly handled a project that led people to donate their red blood cells. This is a little bit different from whole blood donation, because it requires drawing blood, having the red blood cells separated by a machine, and then getting the blood back into the donor. So, people would decline due to the complexity of the procedure and the time it takes. The struggle was real because people would just say no. I thought there must be a better way to communicate about this kind of prosocial health behavior.

With your experience as a communicator and as a researcher, what are the pieces that go into finding a “better way”?

Prosocial motivation is different than guilt or fear appeals, or making people have negative emotions in order to cultivate certain behaviors. Prosocial motivation involves getting people to want to do good things on their own – not making them feel bad. But the concept of prosocial is so complex with many aspects or dimensions: Some people say it’s altruistic. Some say it’s ego. Some say it’s collectivism because they want to do good things for society. And some people say it’s because people have high moral value. I want to find that motivation by incorporating these different types of dimensions, and then use that motivation to develop communication strategies.

You’ll be using these dimensions to identify a better way to communicate these prosocial health behaviors. Can you walk us through how you plan to do that in this study?

We plan to do two studies to complete this project. In study one, we will conceptualize and create a measurement of prosocial motivation. We're going to use a survey where, for example, we ask people if they are an organ donor, using a scale that we’ve created from previous research. Then to test the scale, we'll ask them questions like whether they donate blood for the benefit of others or if they do it for the sticker they get afterward. Do they feel they are making the United States a better place? Do they feel it’s their civic duty? After collecting that data, we will analyze it to see which dimensions contribute more or less to prosocial motivation.

The second study is the application of the prosocial motivation scale. It could be in an organ donation context or it could be for clinical trial participation. We will design specific message communication strategies based on the scale. For example, if we find that actual egoism is more salient in that prosocial motivation scale, we'll emphasize egoism in that message, or we can find there are two or three dimensions that standout in that scale. So, the first study is building the tool. The second study is the application of the tool. So, in the future, a researcher or a nonprofit organization will be able to use our toolbox to develop their prosocial messages.

To a health or nonprofit communicator, what will this toolbox look like?

The toolbox will be a scale and application strategies. When a nonprofit communicator wants to design a message – for example, they want people to donate money – they can use the scale first to test their message before they launch their campaign. It will save time, money, and resources. They will be able to pick salient dimensions and highlight the parts of their messages in order to promote certain prosocial behaviors.